Uncertainty in everyday life: Risk, worry and trust

Abstract

This editorial provides an introduction to and overview of the six papers published in this special issue on Uncertainty and Risk in Everyday Life. While uncertainty and risk are connected and the terms often used interchangeably, we argue here that the terms are not synonymous. ‘Risk’ can be used both to describe the threat posed by uncertainty and the response to such threats. The approach to risk grounded in cognitive rationality involves collecting and analysing knowledge and using it as part of a formal decision-making process. Its development reflects the aspiration to control the world and its uncertainties through the use of systematic knowledge and is part of the increasing rationalisation of contemporary society. However, the investment of time and resources required means that this approach tends to be restricted to contexts in which such resources are available and the investments are considered worthwhile, i.e. they are most likely to be used by large scale bureaucratic organisations. By contrast, in everyday life the uncertainties are often fairly predictable and resources more limited. In such contexts, uncertainty tends to be viewed as worries or concerns that are often the product of the behaviour of other people. Individuals develop low cost strategies to manage their worries and concerns. These strategies draw on readily available resources: relationships, feelings and intuition which underpin both trust (through maintaining close relationships) and distrust (through avoiding threatening individuals and places).

Keywords:

• uncertainty
• risk
• worry
• trust
• distrust
• everyday life

Introduction

As Crawshaw and Bunton note (2009) in their article in this special issue, sociologists have linked social, economic and technological change to a growth of uncertainty in contemporary society which is experienced by individuals and social groups as a threat to their wellbeing. This development is often linked to heightened awareness and sensitivity to risk as an expression of uncertainty which can be described as ‘virtual risk’. Jonathon Porritt, the environmental campaigner, defined virtual risk as ‘assertions of statistical probability [that] amount to little more than expressions of uncertainty’ (Porritt 2001). In economic theory, risk and uncertainty are linked concepts relating to expectations of the future. Risk can be estimated in terms of probability whereas uncertainty is immeasurable and therefore outside the realms of reason and rationality (McCormick et al. 1977, p. 431). In most situations, individuals have some but not complete knowledge. Risk, while it provides some quantitative expectations about the future, cannot by definition provide complete certainty. As the economist John Maynard Keynes commented in his General Theory, in most situations individuals have to combine rational and non-rational strategies with:

our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance (Keynes 1973, p. 163).

If actors had complete or perfect knowledge, for example as specified by classic economists in perfect markets, there would no element of uncertainty and risk. According to economic theory then, actors could base their decisions, in the case of markets to sell or buy a particular commodity, on the rational maximisation of utility or benefit. The concept of Homo economicus has been contested within and without economic theory (perhaps never before as much as at present), but in this issue we are most concerned with what happens ‘between’ rationality and subjectivity, and how research into risk responses fits within theories of uncertainty put forward by seminal authors in this field, including Douglas (1966, 1992) and Bourdieu (1990). Through attempting to differentiate between risk and uncertainty, we propose that there is a distinct sociology of uncertainty within lay responses that bears further investigation by social scientists.

The threat of uncertainty: Risk and worry

The term risk can be used to describe two separate albeit interrelated aspects of uncertainty, the threat it poses to individuals and groups, and the strategies used to manage these threats. The use of risk to describe the threat of undesired and undesirable outcomes is evident in non-expert use of the term risk. As Hawkes and colleagues (2009) note in their article in this issue, when invited to comment on their everyday life in solicited diaries and interviews, participants tended to use the terms ‘risk’ and ‘worry’ interchangeably and referred to issues of lesser magnitudes as ‘concerns.’ They tended to worry about threats to health, especially their own, threats to their family and threats from broader society, including crime, drug using, anti-social behaviour and a perceived culture of disrespect amongst youth. Respondents were less concerned about threat from eating food, the environment and technology. The perception of threats was clearly influenced by media representation; in their diaries respondents noted such representations of the threats, for example of eating certain types of food or global warming, but sometimes wrote that they did not worry about them. These documented responses to risk provide a rich resource for exploring the interplay between hypothesised risk anxieties, media narratives and subjective sensibilities, and demonstrate the variance of ‘reflexivity’ amongst individuals in their own experiences of risk.

In contrast, individuals may be faced with unfamiliar, threatening and fateful situations: moments where the outcome is both important and uncertain. Such fateful moments involve crucial events and decisions that will shape a person's future life, when ‘an individual stands … at the crossroads of his existence’ (see Giddens 1991, p. 113). Such moments may be experienced as threatening and psychologically shocking when there is no warning and the event is sudden and catastrophic. When the events involve a large number of people and are represented in and reproduced by the media, the shock may be felt nationally or even globally. Such events undermine the continuity of everyday life and puncture the ‘protective cocoon’ that usually filters out possible dangers (Giddens 1991, p. 244), introducing uncertainty and a challenge to ‘the routines of daily activity or to more far-reaching ambitions’ (Giddens 1991, p. 196).

Individuals who experience serious and especially sudden or traumatic serious illness such as a stroke undergo much disruption of their expectations and the associated uncertainty. Most stroke survivors describe the onset of the stroke as sudden, unexpected and shocking (for a fuller analysis of stoke survivors' responses to risk see Alaszewski 2006, Alaszewski et al. 2006). As Jiang (2009) in this issue notes, threats to individuals and groups do not have to be immediate and experienced; they can be more distant and imagined. Most European Chinese were not directly exposed to SARS. However the awareness of the disease spread rapidly through various communication media and with it perceptions of illness and possibly death from contact with individuals who had recently visited the affected areas, especially other European Chinese. In this discussion, the fear of a given risk (in this case exposure to SARS) travels in a manner which mimics viral transmission of disease, and analysis of individual responses to this fear again echoes the work of Mary Douglas in relation to fear of pollution and contamination amongst social groups.

While threats that are sudden and unexpected are likely to attract attention, several articles in this issue relate to activities which are more ubiquitous. Articles by Roth (2009) and Bourne and Robson (2009) deal with an everyday activity, sex, which is associated with the threat of sexually transmitted disease. Roth (2009) focussed on worry about HIV/AIDS amongst the Ariaal community in Northern Kenya where there is widespread reporting of ‘dangerous’ behaviours such as having multiple partners, concurrency, sexual mixing and not using condoms. He reports that respondents in his study did not worry about which of their own sexual behaviours were potentially dangerous but respondents, especially women, were worried about the sexual behaviour of their partners. The difference between men and women could reflect the greater personal autonomy which men had although both men and women were concerned about the dangerousness of others and were fearful of those who might pose a disease threat. Bourne and Robson (2009) also focus on the potential threat of sex though in a different setting, the United Kingdom. They point out that while individuals may worry about sexually transmitted disease they have other concerns and these may be more important. In particular, they were concerned about maintaining ‘romantic’ relationships with their partners based on a trust and intimacy. These two papers deal with sexual behaviour in very different contexts and cultures but both reveal that the concepts of trust and techniques of harbouring intimacy are used to manage and express fear. Once again, this work draws on Douglas' (1992) concepts of sensing risk and attributing blame to ‘others’, and the behaviours of intimacy and trust are employed to demarcate the boundary between self, stranger and trusted intimate partner.

Crawshaw and Bunton (2009) and Ruston (2009) identify a different kind of threat which is enduring and on-going, and which can be seen as a product of living within a threatening or risky environment. Both papers explore the threats perceived by individuals living in areas of social deprivation. Again, threats are seen to emanate from ‘other’ individuals or groups living in these areas. In Crawshaw and Bunton's research, young men recognised that they were living in a hazardous environment and their safety was threatened by dangerous individuals on the estate such as hard drug users, (‘smack heads’), as well as the police who harassed them. Ruston also identified the perceived threat created by dangerous others including not only ‘typical deviants’ such as young people and drug addicts but also neighbours. She considers the ways in which such ‘dangerous’ individuals can become associated with specific places and spaces making such spaces, by association, threatening and dangerous. Ruston notes that space can present other threats, it can cut individuals off from those that could provide support and protection, i.e. are trustworthy. Thus the natural and built-environment of the area created physical barriers resulting both in isolation and in difficulties in accessing those who could be trusted to provide support and protection.

Risk and trust: Alternative ways of managing the threats of uncertainty

Where uncertainty creates worry, individuals develop strategies to manage such concerns. Risk and trust are linked as they can both be used as ways of managing the uncertainty of the future. A risk approach to uncertainty appears to make uncertainty manageable and controllable through measurement and calculation, i.e. the use of statistics and probability. A formal risk approach involves collecting and analysing knowledge and using it as part of a formal decision-making process. Its development reflects the aspiration to control the world and its uncertainties through the use systematic knowledge and is part of the increasing rationalisation grounded in ‘the knowledge or belief … that one can in principle, master all things by calculations’ (Weber 1947, p. 139). The required investment of time and resources means that the formal rational approach tends to be restricted to contexts in which such investments are worthwhile, i.e. the threats and potential benefits are high. Thus large scale bureaucratic organisations are likely to use formal risk approaches. As Shiell and his colleagues (2009) argue, managers of health care organisations tend to invest in complex risk management strategies such as portfolio management. Yet the use of risk governance strategies has not yet proved to be effective, or even beneficial, in managing risk; as Kemshall and Maguire (2001) describe, there can be numerous human factors at play during ‘objective’ risk assessments and, even when actuarial tools are incorporated into practice, the resulting knowledge becomes modified, pooled with instinctive reactions and gut responses, and synthesised into something quite different from the ‘initial assessment’ by the human actors involved. As the process of managing risk becomes more technical and complex, public trust in organisations and their ability to manage risk is challenged, so that ‘trust’ can be both a technique for managing risk, and a response to how others are perceived to manage risk on the individual's behalf.

The theme of ‘trust’ as a way of managing uncertainty is found in several of the articles in this issue. While formal risk analysis and management seeks to make uncertainty visible and measurable through cognitive rationality, trust renders uncertainty invisible through an act of faith. The structured approach to risk turns specific events into abstract numbers to measure probability. Trust in contrast is embedded in personal relations and communications, so that when individuals encounter abstract expert systems such as medicine they judge them in terms of the person who is the representative of that system. As Brown (2008) has argued, individuals in their everyday life use private contextualised knowledge such as intuition which is created by their feelings and experiences while organisations can only deal with public generalised knowledge created by ‘faceless’ flows of information and therefore disregard other forms of knowledge based on personal and emotional aspects. As Bourne and Robson note, this disregard of personal and emotional basis of everyday decision making creates serious difficulties when organisations want to change individual behaviour. The public health advice that individuals should protect themselves against sexually transmitted disease through ‘safe sex’, particularly through the use of condoms, is likely to have limited impact when individuals seek an intimate and trusting relationship and not using protective devices demonstrates trust. Individuals considered sex to be ‘safe’ when they trusted their partner:

Sex in a loving relationship could be safe even if condoms were not used. It was safe so long as you trusted your partner. It was safe when it felt safe (Bourne and Robson, 2009, p. 283).

The decision not to use protective devices indicates that individuals value the appearance of normality that maintained the protective cocoon of everyday life, i.e. they demonstrated specific trust in their partners and ‘basic trust’ (Giddens 1991) in the security of everyday life. Whilst rational actor theory would predict use of condoms to prevent sexually acquired infection, or pregnancy, what these researchers explain is the counterintuitive finding that using protective devices indicates distrust and undermines the ‘romantic’ and intimate relationship they wanted to create with their partners. For these respondents, the need to maintain normality was more powerful than the uncertain risks associated with unprotected sex, a finding that was similar to Harries' insight that some individuals at risk of flooding preferred to think of their homes as places that were innately safe, and therefore disregarded evidence to the contrary and rejected the idea of defending their homes (Harries 2008, p. 479).

However several of the articles indicate that worry can be managed in a very different way, through distrust and the use of space to avoid the distrusted. Jiang (2009) indicates that the threat of SARS was personalised, associated with specific individuals. Those individuals, and the places where they might be encountered, were likely to be were avoided. Such social distancing explains much of the harmful effect of the ‘virtual SARS epidemic,’ for example the major reduction in the Chinese catering business with the reduced presence of both tourists and members of the local Chinese community. As Jiang notes ‘many Chinese avoided the Chinatowns, Chinese restaurants and community centres, and visitors, families, friends who had been to affected China’. Ruston (2009, p. 257), in her study, also identifies the distrust experienced by individuals living in a deprived locality. She analyses the ways in which individuals used social distancing as a protective device:

isolation also represented a mechanism used by residents to protect themselves from the dangers they believed to be lurking in their immediate physical and social environment. Three distancing or isolating devices were reported: avoidance, surveillance and fortification.

However she also notes the costs of this strategy of distrust. Individuals who live on the estate worried about isolation and recognised the negative effects which it has on their mental health. Yet their avoidance of ‘dangerous’ individuals and places often acted to increase their own isolation.

Crawshaw and Bunton (2009), in their study of young men on a deprived housing estate, identify a combination of trust and distrust. The young men felt safe with their own peers who shared their lifestyle, for example used ‘soft drugs’ such as alcohol and cannabis but distrusted individuals and groups with different lifestyles and values, for example ‘smackheads’ who injected heroin, and policemen who came from outside the estate. These authors argue that this relationship is grounded in ‘habitus,’ arising from shared values inherited through having a common history. This habitus was expressed in various ways, for example in the differentiation between soft and hard drug use, and a masculine culture: legitimating some risk taking such as soft drug use to maintain connection with the peer group and the use of violence to defend oneself and one's peers from external threats.

Comment

While uncertainty may be ubiquitous and growing in contemporary society, it should not be seen as synonymous with risk. Large bureaucratic organisations may seek to control uncertainty through measurement and calculation; formal methods of risk analysis and management based on the use of codified knowledge and statistics and probability. However, in everyday life, individuals have neither the time, resources nor inclination to use such approaches. Indeed the use of explicit measures to protect oneself, as in safe sex, may create other threats, for example undermining an intimate romantic relationship. Uncertainty may still be conceptualised as risk, but it is risk as a relatively broad and generalised concept, which can equally be equated with worry or concern. Furthermore there is little evidence of the use of formal risk management techniques to manage such worries or concerns. Rather the emphasis is on strategies which utilise individuals' social skills and their judgments of situations, especially of others, which might be based on heuristics, intuition and shaped by shared experience and habitus. Such judgments can be contextualised in terms of trust; the willingness and importance of trusting some individuals (those one likes and shares experiences with) and the distrust of others (those one dislikes and fears). The papers in this collection provide empirical examples of how individuals respond to everyday risks in a range of circumstances. Given the focus upon the perceptions and responses of individuals, couples and families, it is not surprising that the studies are theoretically based in cultural constructions of risk. Whilst systemic and organisational responses to risk have been well documented in the literature, documenting personal responses to risk requires interpretative methods which are in turn reliant on case studies and individual accounts, and recognition of this aspect is hence a slower and more gradual process. Micro-level qualitative research is shown to be at its most valuable here, as researchers work at the borders of concepts such as risk, trust and uncertainty and begin to chart the range and permutations of human responses to living in an uncertain world.